152 THE TIME OF THE MAMMOTHS. 
ies of the Siberian elephants have been preserved, enables us 
to form an idea of the external form and habits of the crea- 
ture far more satisfactory in its character than that which 
we have of any other extinct animal, except a few which 
have been exterminated by the hand of man. 
Generally the geologist is compelled to effect the restora- 
tion or rebuilding of the form of the extinct animal from 
fragments of a skeleton, the gaps of which he must fill by 
inference, and this conjectural framework is afterwards to be 
thrown into a more or less imaginary outline of soft, envel- 
oping parts. He is only too thankful if he finds that decay 
has left him a tolerably fair basis which he may build his 
labor upon. But in the case of many of the Siberian ele- 
phants the preservation is perfect; not only the skeleton, 
but the whole mass of the soft parts; the external envelope 
of skin, with its protecting covering of hair; even the deli- 
cate and perishable structures of the eye, an organ which so 
quickly perishes when decay begins to work, are all in an 
unchanged condition. Nor is the preservation that of form 
alone ; the chemical condition of the body is unchanged, it is 
still flesh and blood; its imprisonment in the ice of the 
frozen soil of the Lena delta for an hundred thousand years, 
more or less, has not perceptibly changed its constitution ; 
animals feed greedily on this flesh which has endured twenty 
times as long as the historical record. The dogs and wolves 
gather from afar to the feast whenever one of these bodies 
is uncovered, and there seems no good reason why those 
abnormal appetites of Paris, which find a new titillation of 
the palate in every monstrosity of diet, should not get a 
sweeter morsel from these preadamic elephants than they 
have obtained from their choice pieces of the knackers yard. 
Fortune certainly awaits the next rival of the Aois treres 
Provenceaux, if he will bid for it with elephant steaks from 
Siberia. The many ingenious inventors, who seek to find a 
means of preserving substances liable to perish by decay, 
who are constantly endeavoring to solve the problem of how 
